Plastic Porkbone

A Holiday Less Meaningless

Alternate title: "Happy New Year!!!!"

There are two types of New Years people: those who go out and party on New Years Eve night, and those who could give a rat's ass and go to sleep at like 10 O'Clock.  I fall into that second category.   You'll never catch me standing in a giant crowd counting down the seconds to the new year; I don't even care for new years resolutions that much.  I just don't get it - but then again, there are a lot of things I don't get.

The other day, in-between a hundred people wishing me "happy new year" and me thinking, "whatever" - it occurred to me.  When our daughter is old enough, she may start wondering why we don't do anything at New Years.  So as a preventive measure, we decided to start our own New Years tradition.   That is, other than the already popular, "taking down the Christmas decorations" and "putting up the new calendar."

We are actually doing something my parents started back when I was a child.  We called it "New Years Sheets" - and it was really sort of an ongoing time capsule.  It was a way of looking back at the previous year and looking forward to the next, but the trick was you answered a set of questions on paper, to be stashed away and used for blackmail sometime in your future.

Some sample answers from my 1985 sheet:

Favorite Movie:  Back to the Future

Favorite Book:  The Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe

Favorite TV Show:  Misfits of Science

Favorite Song: Family Man I forget the other name.  It was in "Breakin 2."

 
Anyway this year we re-established this tradition by filling out sheets as a family.  The baby Alison couldn't write her own, so we had to help her.  Here is one of her answers:

Favorite thing that happened this year: "I was born"

Well, she's got a point there.  Happy new year.  Now go look at a picture of the naked baby.

Christmas: Explained

Well Christmas is over, and it’s time to go back to work. Believe it or not I have had five days off in a row! Look, you can only sit around, eat cookies, drink coffee, scratch yourself, and watch football for so long. You’ve got to stand up and go somewhere eventually. Although I must say I have enjoyed spending the extra time with my lovely daughter Alison, who in the past five days has grown another tooth, and just about has “this crawling thing” figured out.
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Anyway, a few days ago I said I would explain what Christmas means in our household. It seems that some people are a bit confused by people who celebrate Christmas, yet do not consider themselves Christians. For these people I present my “1960s Animated Holiday Special Philosophy of Christmas.”

First, we have the Charlie Brown Christmas view of Christmas. As Linus is so kind to point out in this special, Christmas is all about Jesus, and all the commercialism, lights, and pink aluminum Christmas trees are all distractions. Christmas is a Christian holiday, plain and simple. (Never mind that Charlie Brown and Linus are the only two people in the entire show that seem to believe this).

Second, we have the Grinch Who Stole Christmas view. This special tells us that Christmas is about togetherness with family and friends (not religion, and not even Santa Claus) – and that no matter what you do, take away all the presents and decorations – Christmas will still come to Whoville. Of course this is also flawed, because if some asshole came around and stole all the presents from every house in your town, people would be pissed as hell. They certainly wouldn’t come out of their houses singing. Plus, there’s no way that dog Max could tow that sleigh up the mountain.

Anyway, I subscribe completely to the Grinch Who Stole Christmas view. There are people all over the world who celebrate Christmas but who are not Christians (take Japan, for instance). My family is another great example – Christmas is extremely important to us, yet we don’t go to church or have a lighted nativity scene in our front yard. Ironically, we do watch the Charlie Brown Christmas special every year, and enjoy it very much. Go figure. But we also watch other things, such as “The Year Without a Santa Claus”, and the totally whacked-out “The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus”, which explains why Santa is immortal.

The bottom line is this: lately, some jackasses have come out on TV and in print saying that Christmas is under attack or some crap. That since Target or Wal-Mart are advertising “holiday” sales instead of “Christmas” sales, they are somehow offending the baby Jesus.  The fact is, Christmas may be a religious holiday on paper, but for millions of people all around the world, it’s something else entirely. In fact, I would argue that while Linus and Charlie Brown may have been right about the “true meaning of Christmas” from a Christian perspective, Dr. Seuss said it best when he wrote “Maybe Christmas, perhaps, means a little bit more!”

Merry Christmas, from this agnostic to you.

The Joy of Over Spending

I remember the year it happened: 1993 was the year that Christmas for me became more about giving than receiving.  This was because I had met Irene (my wife) earlier that year, I had been earning a decent income, and I also still lived at home.  This was a very interesting set of conditions which resulted in an unusual amount of money being spent on Christmas presents that year.  This is when I discovered the "joy of giving" -- or as it is also known: the joy of spending a little too much money on others.

What I'm getting at here is that I love to buy the Christmas presents.  Sure, it's tough when you just bought a house and had a baby, and your household has a very limited income, but you still want to do something.  So it is with this backdrop that I started shopping this year for my wife and child.

However, I have noticed something about myself lately.  Everyone knows I hate Wal-Mart (don't get me started on NASCAR!), and the corporatization of America that it represents.  Well, I found this to be a real problem when I started Christmas shopping this year.  I didn't want to just buy presents at the same old places.... and what I realized was that it wasn't the giant companies that bothered me, but the fact that all these companies are the same everywhere.

This was partially the argument for living in a relatively small town versus a giant suburb.  Go down main street in our town and there are neat little shops, with homemade things and unique gifts.  Go to any suburb in America and you will find the same giant corporate retail stores as anywhere else.  So my goal this year was to do as much shopping as possible outside of the corporate chains. 

The result?  Well I am quite happy with the things I found, but I had to travel far and wide to find them.  I did much of my shopping this year in a small town about an hour south of the Twin Cities, and some more in a little independent shopping district near Saint Paul.  In the end, however, I have the satifaction of knowing that the gifts I purchased are unique, or at the very least, that I supported some small businesses during a holiday season dominated by corporate giants such as Targhetto and Shit-Mart.